Many academic conferences in the Humanities and Social Sciences work in the following way: prospective attendees submit brief summaries of their presentations, then a selection committee reviews those proposals, and if there are too many for the time available for the conference, picks the "best" ones. The ICMS at Kalamazoo is no different.

The choices the selection committee makes though will necessarily steer the conference in a certain direction, allowing more of a focus on one topic, minimizing focus on another, or trying to strike a balance between them all. This year, before the 2019 Congress, a group of scholars have written a letter of concern about the opaque (one might even say "secretive") way the selection process was handled and how the anonymous committee seems to be moving away from discussions related to the state of the field. Particularly worrying is how these decisions minimize, according to the letter, "the intellectual guidance that scholars of color would provide at the conference, when these scholars are already severely underrepresented in the field." (Full disclosure, I signed the letter.)

One side is pointing to the way the the Middle Ages have traditionally been studied, how those traditional areas of focus have tended to blind scholars to the richness and variety of that slice of the past. The other side is saying, effectively, that they don't belong here for asking those questions. In other words, those who wrote the letter are trying to do what scholarship does - ask new questions, look for new answers - while the other are being gatekeepers, concerned about change because it threatens their own status.

The study of the Crusades was used to justify European colonial enterprises around the globe, with the Crusades as a pre-cursor to those later 18th- and 19th-century expeditions. In the first instance, Christian holy war "saved" the West and beat back the tides of a barbarous East. Now, these 19th and early 20th century scholars thought, the West was returning to reassert its proper place.

Jules Michelet's Histoire de France (History of France), published first in 1833 and still in print, is perhaps most famous for starting the myth of the apocalyptic "Terrors of the Year 1000" but his analysis of how the Middle Ages led to modern France begins with a quasi-scientific racial survey of French lands. As much as that section might cause concern today, this was common at the time; nation was thought to be a coherent people, connected by blood and culture.

Yet, those refrains still echo across the internet and in contemporary political discourse and a growing body of scholars, such as those who wrote the letter of concern, think it's our responsibility to at least acknowledge that.

A cross with "DEUS VULT" is seen in the picture. "DEUS VULT" was the slogan of the crusades. The racist Pegida movement started to rally again in Munich, Germany, on February 15, 2018. (Photo by Alexander Pohl/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

So, the point of the letter of concern to the ICMS isn't that the Congress, or all medievalists, are avowed white supremacists (even if we should remember that white-collar racism is a real thing and there are almost certainly colleagues who hold odious views). Instead, the point of the letter is that those of us who study the Middle Ages must be aware how that period is being used outside the academy and how the academy itself helped create those appropriations.

Matthew Gabriele is a professor of Medieval Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. He researches the European Middle Ages, as well as how that period is remembered in the modern world – both in formal history writing and in pop culture...